18

I tapped Amira. “Wait.”

I kicked at the yellow emergency box on the wall. Once, twice. The cover was warped, but remained closed.

“Come on!” I hissed to myself.

“Hold a second,” Amira said, tapping my shoulder to make contact. “It’s locked to recruits. Let me spoof the recognitions.”

The warped cover twisted open as she waved a wrist over it, careful not to catch her suit on the sharp edges.

“Take the ax,” she said.

“Sweet.” I grabbed the ax inside. The handle, made for larger, alien hands, twisted and bulged awkwardly.

But it was a weapon, and holding it made me feel better.

Amira grabbed a can of fire suppressant.

We passed through the utility corridors in the subsections, walking right around clogged emergency airlocks and through gaping holes. Trolls, it seemed, liked punching through things. Several times we stepped over the bodies of dead struthiforms near reinforced bulkheads. They’d been waiting for the enemy to come at them through the doors.

Not through the solid walls.

It appeared the trolls had punched through the struthiforms as well. Alien blood saturated the walls and piles of organs lay on the floor.

We were going to have to pass the dorms to get to the armor. How many dead people were inside their rooms?

Amira slowed down ahead of me. I put my hand on her shoulder. “The sensors up ahead are down,” she said. “I don’t see any movement behind or ahead of the dead spot, though.”

“Should I take a peek?” The emergency lighting faded away ahead. A pitch-black corner menaced us.

“My eyes are better,” Amira said with gritted teeth. “You can’t see in this.”

She pushed my hand away and ever so slowly leaned around the corner.

Nothing happened.

I let out a deep breath. “Come on,” she said.

We stepped around the corner into the dark. I lit up the corridor with the light on my shoulder, just in case anything dangerous was lurking there.

A crouched form cast a shadow on the gray floor. It turned a reptilian head toward us.

“Shit.” Raptor.

The reddish armor jerked as the alien moved away from a body it had been inspecting on the ground and stood.

Amira shoved me back toward the corner, making contact for a second. “Run!”

I was already backpedaling as she passed me by, watching the raptor’s long arms pull some kind of rifle up. The beady black eyes stared directly at me, cold and focused. I smacked the light off, plunging the corridor back into darkness, and scrabbled around the corner as a line of pure, coherent energy struck the spot I’d been standing in just a split second before. “Shit, shit, shit.”

The beam carved up the floor toward the corner, leaving molten metal behind it, until it struck the other side of the wall.

Safely on the other side, I spun around and ran after Amira.

Damn, she was fast. Left, right, I struggled to keep up with her turns. She was using a map in her head of the facility we’d already walked through and was moving us quickly back through it to try to shake the raptor.

But then she abruptly stopped and I stumbled into her. “This corner, make a stand,” she gasped. At least she was also out of breath.

“We should run,” I said.

“We can’t. It’s following us. It’s catching up. I can’t shake it. But I can see it. Get ready with the ax. We’ll probably only get one chance.”

How the fuck was she so calm?

I stood, my own heavy breathing filling the helmet, conden­sation trickling down it. If there were atmosphere, we would hear footsteps. But now I had to rely on Amira’s vision of the raptor through the cameras.

“When I say ‘swing,’ ” she said, “swing. Right at this height. Two feet out into the open corridor.”

I shifted on my feet. This was happening. Now.

“Get ready. Three, two, one: Swing!”

Raptors, even in armor, stood only a foot higher than a human. I adjusted the ax and swung on pure faith as hard as I could. And at the end of the swing, the raptor turned the corner. The ax smacked into its faceplate.

It didn’t shatter. Instead, the ax rebounded, hard. But the impact clotheslined the raptor, its feet flying out from underneath, and it landed hard on its back.

Amira leapt forward and triggered the fire suppressant. She aimed it at the helmet, and gallons of foam covered the visor the moment she pressed the trigger.

I leapt forward with the ax and chopped at the raptor’s helmet again. Foam and ax bounced away as we struggled.

The raptor got to its feet, us clinging to it. Amira dropped the fire can and went for the rifle the raptor was holding. The alien swung around, trying to shake her loose, so I climbed up onto its other arm.

Its vision was obscured from the foam, but it sensed the extra weight and started throwing elbows. The ax went flying, so I punched at its helmet: a useless gesture, but one I hoped at least alarmed the creature. I heard my suit rip as a claw grabbed at me, but I didn’t have time to worry about it.

As Amira wrestled with the trigger guard, the rifle jerked up and around my head. I grabbed the barrel, shoving it toward where I though the raptor’s chin might be, and my vision exploded with light.

We all three fell together.

My vision returned. There was no helmet anymore. Just a cauterized stump of neck where the armor stopped.

For a moment we lay on the alien’s body, breathing hard, grateful to be alive. “We got lucky,” Amira said.

“I’ll take lucky.” My hands shook. Each breath dizzied me. I’d been hit hard in the stomach, maybe broken a rib.

Amira fiddled with the rifle. “Shit. It’s security tagged. It won’t let me fire it. The rifle only fired because the raptor still had control of it when we were fighting. Damn it.”

I wasn’t paying full attention. The dizzy feeling was all wrong. It wasn’t from getting hit. “I’m losing air,” I said, as I realized why the sensation felt so familiar. I remembered the ripping sound when the raptor’s mechanical fingers had tried to grab and break me as I wriggled and squirmed. “My suit’s ripped.”

I patted myself down, panicked, and found the long tear. The suit was trying to compensate by blowing air in for me to breathe as fast as it could. But that spiky, bruised feeling was my skin being exposed to vacuum.

I grabbed the ripped edges and pulled on them, then twisted them around until I could hold the rip somewhat shut.

Losing air still, but not nearly as badly.

The suit began a gentle beep near my ear. Low air warning.

“Quick,” Amira said. She picked up the ax as we went past it and pulled me along with her other hand.

I staggered after her, my vision stuttering as I got to my feet. More lefts, more rights, as Amira guided us back through. I hesitated as we plunged into the dark again. And this time I didn’t light it up. Let the monsters in the dark come for me. I didn’t want to see them.

Amira stopped on the other side.

“We can’t take the elevator or big stairs to get up above. Here’s the emergency ladder.” She lit up a shoulder light.

I stared at the orange ladder on the wall leading up to a hatch. “I only have one hand free.”

“It’s this or run into crickets. And I think there’s a raptor coming down to check on its buddy who’s gone mysteriously silent.”

“I’m almost out of air.”

“So move quickly.”

I grabbed the nearest rung.

“Faster,” Amira said.

I grunted my way up toward the hatch with little grace and a lot of swearing. “How do I open it?”

Amira was silent, her hand on my ankle. “Shit. Came down with loss of pressure. There’s air on the other side, but it doesn’t want to open. Give me a second. Excuse me, hug the ladder.”

She pulled herself up behind me, holding me against the ladder and looking up from my back at the hatch. I relaxed against her. I was getting dizzy, and I didn’t have the energy to hold on. My hands were shaking, my legs close to giving out. The suit had switched to beeping insistently, and breathing was getting hard.

“Hey, you’re getting heavy,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” I tried to pull myself forward.

Amira grabbed a latch and pumped it six times. “Okay, it’s charged.” She yanked it out, and the hatch popped open. “Fucking go!”

I launched myself through.

She closed the hatch behind us. I ripped my helmet off, flopped to my side, and took a deep breath of fresh, invigorating air.

Breathing. I would never take it for granted again. Such a basic, beautiful, primal thing.

“We can’t stay here,” Amira said. “There’s movement. And we made a lot of noise. We have to keep out of their sight.”

“I know,” I said. “Just give me ten seconds to sit here and breathe. That’s all I ask.”